In the manufacture of paper products, such as facial tissue, bath tissue, paper towels, dinner napkins, and the like, a wide variety of product properties are imparted to the final product through the use of chemical additives applied in the wet end of the tissue making process. Two of the most important attributes imparted to tissue through the use of wet end chemical additives are strength and softness. Specifically for softness, a chemical debonding agent is normally used. Such debonding agents are typically quaternary ammonium compounds containing long chain alkyl groups. The cationic quaternary ammonium entity allows for the material to be retained on the cellulose via ionic bonding to anionic groups on the cellulose fibers. The long chain alkyl groups provide softness to the tissue sheet by disrupting fiber-to-fiber hydrogen bonds in the sheet. The use of such debonding agents is broadly taught in the art. Such disruption of fiber-to-fiber bonds provides a two-fold purpose in increasing the softness of the tissue. First, the reduction in hydrogen bonding produces a reduction in tensile strength thereby reducing the stiffness of the sheet. Secondly, the debonded fibers provide a surface nap to the tissue web enhancing the “fuzziness” of the tissue sheet. This sheet fuzziness may also be created through use of creping as well, where sufficient interfiber bonds are broken at the outer tissue surface to provide a plethora of free fiber ends on the tissue surface. Both debonding and creping increase levels of lint and slough in the product. Indeed, while softness increases, it is at the expense of an increase in lint and slough in the tissue relative to an untreated control. It can also be shown that in a blended (non-layered) sheet the level of lint and slough is inversely proportional to the tensile strength of the sheet. Lint and slough can generally be defined as the tendency of the fibers in the paper web to be rubbed from the web when handled.
It is also broadly known in the art to concurrently add a chemical strength agent in the wet-end to counteract the negative effects of the debonding agents. In a blended sheet, the addition of such agents reduces lint and slough levels. However, such reduction is done at the expense of surface feel and overall softness and becomes primarily a function of sheet tensile strength. In a layered sheet, strength chemicals are added preferentially to the center layer. While this perhaps helps to give a sheet with an improved surface feel at a given tensile strength, such structures actually exhibit higher slough and lint at a given tensile strength, with the level of debonder in the outer layer being directly proportional to the increase in lint and slough.
There are additional disadvantages with using separate strength and softness chemical additives. Particularly relevant to lint and slough generation is the manner in which the softness additives distribute themselves upon the fibers. Bleached Kraft fibers typically contain only about 2-3 milliequivalents of anionic carboxyl groups per 100 grams of fiber. When the cationic debonder is added to the fibers, even in a perfectly mixed system where the debonder will distribute in a true normal distribution, some portion of the fibers will be completely debonded. These fibers have very little affinity for other fibers in the web and therefore are easily lost from the surface when the web is subjected to an abrading force. Thus, there remains a need in the art for fiber treatments and treated fibers that positively affect the strength and softness of the resulting fibrous structure, without the limitations typically associated with the use of chemical additives such as deboning agents.